I shared this Twitter thread on that site this morning and will be discussing it on the Jeremy Vine Show on BBC Radio 2 at 12 noon today:
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Just 2 points
I don’t think you are talking about maths. I think you are talking about arithmetic and playing with numbers. And I agree wholeheartedly that is needed.
And where are the teachers to come from?
You are right
I will make that point on Radio 2
I have been advocating exactly this since my kids went to school. Once upon a time, I did a five-day Finance for Non-Financial Managers course. It covered most of the topics you raise, and could easily be adapted for schools. Call it Practical Sums, or Dick “Your money and/or your life” Turpin Maths 🙂
🙂
When I sat O Levels as they were in Scotland in the 1960’s there was Maths and a separate exam for Arithmetic – the latter is what is need not algebra, geometry etc
Agreed
Having worked in housing rent arrears and also with some excellent Citizens Advice Centres, the curriculum could learn a hell of a lot from these sectors in order to help people manage money.
Agreed
In fairness to Sunak, he does appear to envisage something practical of the sort you suggest. The press release concludes: “The government does not envisage making maths A-Level compulsory for all 16-year-olds. Further detail will be set out in due course but the government is exploring existing routes, such as the Core Maths qualifications and T-Levels, as well as more innovative options.”
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/prime-minister-sets-ambition-of-maths-to-18-in-speech
Remains to be seen how that will be done in practice and where the teachers will come from.
Several small points on maths education:
16-18 is too late. Ideally, ease with numbers is learnt BEFORE school at 5. My husband and I had 4 children; all have grown up to be happy with numbers, because that’s the way they heard their parents talking. It’s hard to instil this fundamental ease later in life.
In my view, letting mathematicians teach maths to children up to 18 is a mistake. They want to teach the things they find interesting and easy. Most people (see above) don’t find maths easy, and end up as the majority who say “Oh, I’m no good at maths”. Many of these people are in the HoC and the HoL.
Many years ago, my father, who joined the Regular Army in 1933, found himself appointed to teach sums to National Servicemen. He found it most successful if he used real-life examples, like mortgages and tax, or winning on lotteries. And before despairing about people’s abilities, think how many could do complicated football pool perms, and the abilities market traders had to do speedy mental arithmetic. (I’m using the past tense here because I don’t know how these things are now)
Skill with sums is not inborn; it can be learnt, or taught. What we don’t kniw is who can teach it best, and how. And call it sums, not maths.
I called for arithmetic on Radio 2
I essentially agree with you
I went to a Secondary Modern and also joined the local Air training Corps. There were times some cadets organised a game of darts. I knew which classes some of them were in and i was impressed by the way some of them from lower classes could double or treble numbers, take them away from a total and decided they need a e..g 12 and double 2 – while I was still doing the first part. And I was in the O level class.
They also seemed quite good at learning the words of ( to use a word Richard’s son used about one of his book titles) ‘smutty’ poems.
I guess motivation is a key aid to learning.
Indeed….
Most of the public doesn’t need to be mathematically or statistically literate in their lives, but if you are a minister or in any similar executive position you really need to be in order to make decisions based on the incoming information.
What about a minimum requirement of an exam for statistical literacy before you are qualified to be appointed as a minister? At the moment it is the one job (apart from company owner or CEO) where you can be unskilled in everything (other than producing BS) and not be disqualified.
If there was a short course with an accreditation (like a first aid course at work) that people could sign up for to be passed as competent at understanding statistics, then it would be legitimate to ask a politician who is spouting out some of the usual BS whether they have passed it. It would be just basic, like having a driving license.
Sometimes decisions are so bad (ie not even in their own interests) you have to wonder if they can be rationalised in any other way than the sort of ignorance of not knowing how to navigate a roundabout.
I like it
This would have serious implications for the careers of those not wired to be good at maths in the way in which it is defined in the state system. Creative minded people are simply not good at reductive and sequential thinking, and this appears to entirely dominate the methodologies for teaching maths.
From another angle, it could represent a huge opportunity to revolutionise the teaching and discipline of maths. Imagine maths as the science of complex systems, expressed in terms of visual patterns and dynamic analyses of social systems; of patterns in ecological and earth systems, of anthropology – the reflection of patterns in the physical world. This is maths. You don’t get there via numbers, or arithmetic, or the ability to understand and conduct complex statistical analyses.
By all means install a compulsory module teaching basic, practically orientated financial competence at both the personal and political level – life skill, I’m all for it. But don’t force every career through an abstract, reductive, numerical filter based on ‘arithmatic’ by way of a competitive testing regime, or you will simply smack creative and visual thinkers off the rails and pile stress onto teenagers already at the point of existential crisis.
I attended a top university and have conducted groundbreaking work on the application of complex systems to social and political crises. I am able to do this because I am able process information without being hampered by sequencing and logic. I would be unable to pass a basic test in numerical arithmetic, and I am very, very far from alone in this.
Again – it’s not what you think, it’s how you think. More than ever now we need both creative and reductive thinkers, and compulsory arithmetic in schools is not the way forward.
I wholly agree
We’d do well to also stop the obsession with grammar in English and instead encourage creativity
I would fail KS2 English but I can still write
Let’s focus on outcomes, not process
That obsession with grammer (which extends to the teaching of music too) is probably because of the need to demonstrate progress. Teach creative writing and any progress is very much subjectively assessed. Teach grammar and progress can be illustrated through test results visible to all. If you’re a teacher you want to be able to establish progress on the part of your pupils so you can demonstrate you’re earning your living, pay the mortgage etc. You won’t do that by encouraging creativity. Any so-called system of education which is driven by the need for tutors to pay their mortgage as opposed to the needs of pupils is bound to fail on many levels. The poverty of creative thinking we currently witness is testament to that.
I am struggling with the idea that Newton, Gregorie, Maxwell, Einstein, or in the quantum age, Heisenberg, Pauli, Dirac, Feynman (to name just some) – were not “creative”. You have lost me.
I think there are a variety of forms of creativity
Well there’s this to consider https://ideapod.com/born-creative-geniuses-education-system-dumbs-us-according-nasa-scientists/ and then we have to bear in mind according to Tacitus (Life of Agricola) the whole point of the education Agricola introduced was to create a compliant population, one easy to control. It seems to have worked, too.
As Richard says there are different types of intelligence. There are several theories which have different numbers of types. The best known is Howard Gardener’s eight types
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/10/harvard-psychologist-types-of-intelligence-where-do-you-score-highest-in.html
I think the idea that there are different types of intelligence very obvious
That was actually a question for Joanna, Richard.
“Creative minded people are simply not good at reductive and sequential thinking, and this appears to entirely dominate the methodologies for teaching maths.”
To wwhich I am rendered so close to speechless, I can only barely summon the disfluent interrogative ………..
Eh?
OK sorry – I do have to write properly about this rather than drop random comments here. Oh for the time to do so…
John you are quite right, the term ‘creativity’ is too much of a shorthand and in our western intellectual tradition, carries too much baggage to be at all useful! The point I was making is that the methods of teaching maths in our society work from ‘sums’ upward to the imaginative – the ‘art’ of the mathematical language does not really come to life until well after secondary school education.
I once knew a Professor of pure mathematics at a prominent US university. Her research probed the nature of infinity. Imagine! She told me, ‘we teach small children to count. We should be teaching them to dance….’ I think Richard Feynman would recognise this.
I like that
Classrooms are dangerous environments these days. Will Sunak be seeing to it that every class is conducted in an atmosphere kept Covid-free by sound ventilation and appropriate HEPA filters?
I wish he would
The emphasis on numerical literacy (or reasoning) is right for me. The most important thing in statistics is to understand what question to ask to help you make a useful decision – your point about actual vs percentage change is a really good illustration of this. A particular bugbear of mine (working mostly with industrial managers) is paired comparisons without context – the fact that we made 20% less mistakes today than yesterday is of no use if I don’t understand whether yesterday was particularly bad and today more normal or today is unusually good compared to yesterday’s normality. In other words should I investigate why yesterday was so bad and fix the issue, or why today was so good and embed the practice? Juran (I think) said that a good measure ‘helps you to understand what to differently’, which is a good general guide I think. And don’t even get me started onour use of targets…
Agreed, entirely
All data is contextual
What does 42 mean, after all?
To all those asking where the teachers will come from to teach the arithmetic numeracy –
Play 301 darts and making the kids to the counting.
Play cards – what is your bridge/pontoon/21/poker hand worth?
What’s the value of the balls left on the snooker table?
How likely is Harry Cane/Marcus Rashford/Messi/Ronaldo to score?
How much change should you get back from the money you gave for a purchase? (Yes, so most kids use Apple Pay, but did the bank record it correctly?)
How far does the car go on a full tank?
Should we buy a petrol/diesel/electric car, and what are the respective running costs? Now and in future?
In the light of the costs, should we take the car or the train for this trip?
If we use a bicycle for more short trips, how much will we save?
What could we spend that money on?
If we saved it, how long would it take us to have 1000 quid?
As a child my elder brother and I raced to add up the hymn numbers on a Sunday morning
One of the few things I enjoyed about the service
Really good suggestions about dynamic number learning. Sadly it doesn’t answer the question posed in your first line – where are the teachers to come from?
@Cyndy – I think those questions (and surrounding issues) are or could be part of normal family discourse. So, it starts with mum and dad, probably around the dinner table, if those are still in use.
It’s called functional maths and is taught to special needs kids. I know because I homeschooled my autistic grandson in it, and he passed the exam.
We play a dice game and he can remember 2 to the power of 6 quicker than I can.
When I was training to be a teacher it never ceased to amaze me that those deemed fit to teach primary school pupils could not remember their basic tables. My grandson can. It takes practice.
However, despite having been a teacher of English, I couldn’t get him to pass the writing part of the functional skills English. The terminology is so alien to me. However, he loves reading poetry with me, and has read Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion, and can remember all the terminology in that!
His artistic sister, who is a good pianist as well, having gained distinctions in all her exams, is going to take A level maths as well. The distinctions between creative and scientific no longer holds sway, and thank goodness for that. Or is that just in my family? Her uncle is a musician who took A level maths and physics. My husband was an architect whose A levels were art, English and French.
I used to be amazed at the locals in my pub who said they “couldnae coont mair than their fingers an’ toes”, yet could work out exactly how much the bookie next door would owe them at each stage of a five-horse accumulator bet.
🙂
I taught maths last year, and while I would love more students to take more of an interest, there is a group who will never have an interest, and perhaps would not benefit from many aspects of maths.
What I would like from all of my students, is a better understanding of critical thinking. Actually, I’d like that from most adults too.
MPs included?
Critical thinking would be my preferred first option every time, and then maths.
At work, we are currently at war with the accountants who are supposedly good at maths (Richard? – does one follow the other?) and if we did everything the way they expect it to be done, quite frankly we’d be doing even less than we are now.
My ex Finance Director got this – yes, he read the accounts and looked at the money but for him it was about what we were not doing with it. He tried to get our organisation to look wider and take an ‘invest to save’ attitude and be able to account for things that the orthodox robots don’t and consider to be mere ‘externalities’.
We are just so poor and getting a rounded holistic view about investment in public services that everything just becomes – dare I say it – maths, rather than a true sense of reality of positive impacts – a bit like I suppose the problem you Richard attempt to address by resource accounting and the true cost of using natural resources up. Investment saves money.
If I develop a piece of land that is prone to being dumped on and costs £320 a week for the Council to clear, then it obvious that if the housing revenue account invests in some properties on that site creating an asset and a liability, it saves the General Fund that £320 per week, which is £16,640.00 a year. Extrapolate that over a 50 year LA mortgage and that is £832,000 we’ve saved the council without even adjusting for inflation over 50 years. Why not note that – recognise it as benefit. That is where the critical thinking bit comes in for me. Any savings should surely be offset against the investment. But then you just get tangled in departmental budget headings and ledgers and the accountants tell you that it is ‘too expensive’ in accounting staff time to get someone to work it out!! And then you realise just how little organisations can actually know about the cost of things.
If local councils/ the public sector think that all they have to do is think more ‘commercially’ when in fact they should be addressing market failure, then they’ll all end up like Kensington and Chelsea and keep putting their under-spends in their reserves and with possible disastrous results like they did (Grenfell).
In my academic work we talk about calculable spaces – what is within the accounts – and the incalculable spaces – which is beyond the accounts either deliberately or because they are externalities in the conventional sense
Most interesting things in accounting are in the incalculable space
I think MP’s do know. As you said in the piece which I heard. Inflation going to zero or near as will happen by default but , I suspect, a hefty chunk of them don’t want that to be common knowledge. The medicine worked or is working so we’ll carry on raising interest rates. I’ve not heard that been called out by the media.
Spot on
I think understanding exponentials and the rule of 70 is very important. Indeed, I concur with Professor Albert Bartlett who suggested that the greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.
My oldest son got me this book for Christmas
https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/The-Maths-That-Made-Us-by-Michael-Brooks/9781913348984
I have only just started it but it makes Maths fascinating
There is a big difference between A-level mathematics and functional numeracy, just as there is a big difference between A-level English literature and functional literacy.
If the idea is to make sure that every 18 year old is functionally literate and numerate, then great – not least because an extraordinary fraction of people in prisons have problems with literacy and numeracy. But it would be far to late to start at 16.
We should be making sure every child has a good start in life before they reach primary school. Early years intervention is extraordinarily effective. Time to bring back Sure Start?
Good idea
I worked in further education for 25yrs.
1. Not enough teachers.
2. Will, say BTEC Health & Social Care students who will already have level 2 Maths be expected to study for a further L2 in a subject they don’t want to study? Attendance will be appalling. How much of their current course will be cut to make space for this? Of course, the same question is aimed at A level courses as well. Could increase the no of hours on the programme of study but then we are back to teachers, and classrooms.
3. Will A level maths and physics students be expected to take (what will have to be a L2) maths programme as well? If a couple of hours per week are taken off all programmes then probably yes. How much of a priority do you think students will give it?
4. GCSE maths resit achievement rates are very low, nationally. There’s a reason for that. How will a further maths course fare?
I’ve seen too many of these poorly conceived courses come and go.
Fortunately I left FE 3 yrs ago and I won’t be responsible for crafting this silk purse.
3.
Talking of silk purses… I have worked in adult education and training since 2002. The latest, (probably doomed) attempt by the government to improve adult numeracy is called Multiply.
https://skillsforlife.campaign.gov.uk/courses/multiply/
The funding available for it is £559 million:
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1068822/Multiply_Investment_Prospectus.pdf
I am notionally involved in this, but have many colleagues who are heavily involved in crafting the ‘silk purse’ at the moment. What it is doing, is leeching already precious human resource into developing a curriculum for Multiply away from other important and necessary parts of our offer.
From what I’ve seen, getting adults to do Functional Skills numeracy is hard. You’ll have most success with those who need it as an essential requirement for a job (teaching assistants for example), but getting a large enough cohort of adults together in one place to make it financially viable is real problem across the sector. A lot of functional maths is ’embedded’ in other subjects, delivered through ‘stealth’ if you like. If you want to deliver a course on say ‘healthy eating on a budget’, you could certainly look at money, weights, percentages, fractions, temperature and so on.
For many adult learners ‘getting good at maths’ is so far removed from the reality of their everyday lives. They have jobs, families etc. Who the hell wants to give up their precious free time to do a maths course? Particularly if you already hate maths.
The one thing that Multiply seems to have got right compared to other initiatives, is that to improve the maths skills of the adult population in the UK, it’s going to need to be done on an individual person-by-person level.
When people are struggling with cost of living crisis, is spending £559 million on maths education the best allocation of government money? I have my doubts.
Agreed
Maybe it’s me…but I feel this is all diversionary nonsense from a PM & Party that is bereft of political substance & has been since Cameron stepped forth & became it’s leader. Sunak has spouted forth, & the commentariat are scrambling to offer a rationale in the attempt to give it some context and offer opinions/alternatives. But in the here and now its all navel gazing nonsense. No one has the time to even consider this bollocks as relevant & real to the lives we are living now. Richard, you remain a man of utmost integrity & influence in the life I try to lead but please don’t turn into LBC or Radio 2 at their behest.
What is wrongs with going on the radio?
@Joanna – I’m showing my age here, but in 1979 Gary Zukav wrote a book about the history of (western) physics called The Dancing Wu Li Masters. In it he used some Buddhist metaphors to describe some of the developments in quantum physics. I found it a good read. James Gleick’s Genius (on Feynman) and Chaos (on complexity) also helped tame some difficult concepts for me.
@Ian, I’m a boomer, darling – but who’s counting? 🙂 Maths education killed the subject stone dead for me. I read Gleick’s Chaos when it came out and I was off – never looked back. And agreed… if these were the concepts embedded in early education, we would not be in the mess we are now in.
We’re in for a rocky ride. Put on your red shoes and dance the blues …
@Joanna – I know that song! 🙂
I remember reading an article around 1990 how employers in London despaired of finding UK school leavers with even basic numeracy and literacy skills.
My wife ended up as a lecturer in paediatric nursing but preferred to teach ‘on the ward’ – far more practical and therefore useful. I remember her telling me that she despaired of having ex university student nurses who had even reasonable literacy skills. She never went to university but always had the highest pass rates in her school of nursing. Around the age of 30 she decided she would like to take A level English and English Lit. so she went to night school,she got ‘A’s in both.
My father born and raised in a really rough and tough part of Glasgow. Left school at 14 with excellent exam results, went to work in England and at 16 decided it would be good experience to work abroad (1926). He applied for a job in a 5* hotel in the Italian Alps. In 6 months he was fluent in Italian and French.
Having lived in 3 different mainland countries I am appalled at just how inarticulate so many ‘ordinary’ UK school kids are compared to the Dutch,Spanish and French. There are hundreds of thousands leaving school at 16 in the UK who are illiterate. When we lived for 2 years in northern Galicia, I had a great friendship with a Galician woman who set out to teach us Spanish. Angela, my wife was especially shocked at the depth to which the Spanish learn their language compared to English and that from someone with an ‘A’ level in her language.
It seems that with the end of empire at the end of WW11 it’s been, with exceptions a downward spiral ever since. A first class education is vital to society as a whole. I remember having a friend in the early 70s’ who taught maths. His home was always full of his 6th form students playing chess and bridge, a totally positive environment. Then he applied for a mortgage and was shocked that he was turned down as were many construction workers who actually built the houses. He left teaching to work in Saudi Arabia. After a few years he was a completely different person and not for the better. To see an excellent maths teacher who inspired young people to achieve, lost to society.
There’s a very simple question to ask – is business a function of society or is society a function of business. In the UK for me the answer is simple which is why I will never live there again and I feel so sorry for those who have no choice.